Monterey Shale Rivals Earlier Shale Giants

Monterey Shale

California's Monterey Shale deposits may contain more oil than North Dakota's Bakken and Texas' Eagle Ford -- two giant US shale deposits that have just begun to change the face of global oil production.

California's energy problem sits in Sacramento, in the form of a lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast state government / faux environmental industrial complex. Sacramento is the enemy of California's energy future.

Running from Los Angeles to San Francisco, California's Monterey Shale is thought to contain more oil than North Dakota's Bakken and Texas's Eagle Ford -- both scenes of an oil boom that's created thousands of jobs and boosted U.S. oil production to the highest rate in over a decade.

In fact, the Monterey is thought to hold over 400 billion barrels of oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's nearly half the conventional oil in all of Saudi Arabia. The United States consumes about 19 million barrels of oil a day...

Several oil companies have put together research teams to work on the Monterey, said Katie Potter, head of exploration and production staffing at NES Global Talent, a company that recruits oil industry professionals.

If the Monterey takes off, Potter said the impact on jobs in the state would be huge, saying the shale boom has already created 600,000 jobs nationwide over the last few years.

... _CNN

Governor Jerry Brown along with the Sierra Club, would like to stop California's energy boom before it can begin. But they are making many enemies among the grass roots by doing so, and if they cannot find a way to compromise their faux environmental dogma for the sake of California's fiscal health, there will be a reckoning.

Approaching California's Green Energy Wasteland Catastrophe

The California government's firm commitment to intermittent unreliable forms of energy is taking the state into an economic, energy, and employment wasteland, from which it may take several decades to recover.

RCE

California residents already pay nearly three times the rate as many other states and that figure is headed straight up as well. All this will weigh heavily on the California economy. Businesses are already responding by moving out at a very rapid rate...

...electricity prices are headed straight up. This is because wind and solar are still far more expensive than fossil fuels and nuclear. These costs are often disguised in that wind and solar can be produced at zero marginal costs when the wind blows or the sun shines. But these sources must be constantly backed up by gas, coal and nuclear, which become more expensive to run when they can only sell their power intermittently.

All this is driving business out of the state. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, several states have now opened full-time recruiting offices in California hoping to lure away businesses. Chief Executive Magazine ranks California last in the country for its business climate. Taxes and regulations are often mentioned but the “high cost of doing business” – which includes electricity prices – always a major factor as well. _RCE

California's badly structured energy policy is reminiscent of its disastrous immigration policy combined with its catastrophic policy of public employee compensation packages -- all of which are combining to create the perfect storm of catastrophic collapse for California government.

Particular counties and municipal areas may be in a good position to weather the coming storm. But most of the state will be devastated.

California Morons Risking it all On Intermittent Unreliables

California is obligated by legal mandate to provide 1/3 of its electrical power by "green energy," including intermittent unreliable forms such as big wind and big solar, by the year 2020. Governor Brown of California wants to increase that requirement to 40% of California's electrical power via intermittent unreliables. But what will happen to California's already shaky economy as power consumers are forced to pay higher and higher rates, and as power brownouts and blackouts become more common -- as in a third world country?

One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power — and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet — is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.

"The public hears solar is free, wind is free," said Mitchell Weinberg, director of strategic development for Calpine Corp., which owns Delta Energy Center. "But it is a lot more complicated than that."

Wind and solar energy are called intermittent sources, because the power they produce can suddenly disappear when a cloud bank moves across the Mojave Desert or wind stops blowing through the Tehachapi Mountains. In just half an hour, a thousand megawatts of electricity — the output of a nuclear reactor — can disappear and threaten stability of the grid.

To avoid that calamity, fossil fuel plants have to be ready to generate electricity in mere seconds. That requires turbines to be hot and spinning, but not producing much electricity until complex data networks detect a sudden drop in the output of renewables. Then, computerized switches are thrown and the turbines roar to life, delivering power just in time to avoid potential blackouts.

The state's electricity system can handle the fluctuations from existing renewable output, but by 2020 vast wind and solar complexes will sprawl across the state, and the problem will become more severe. _LATimes

Big wind and big solar -- the "intermittent unreliable" forms of energy generation -- are "feel-good" public pacifiers for coastal dwellers steeped in carbon hysteria. But are these well indoctrinated, pseudo-intellectual academically lobotomised and politically correct devotees of faux environmentalism willing to pay the ultimate costs of their lefty-Luddite neo-Malthusian ideologies? Probably not.

... by 2017 the state will be short by about 3,100 megawatts of flexible power that it can dedicate to meeting reserve needs — about what three nuclear reactors produce. The company is pushing the state Public Utility Commission to require that capacity. The commission has been noncommittal so far. _LAT

Here are the top 10 reasons why businesses are leaving California, as of May, 2012:

#1 – Excessively Adversarial: For eight years in a row, Chief Executive magazine found California to be the worst state for business. Editors said the state appears to have slipped deeper into the “ninth circle of business hell,” a reference to Dante’s Inferno. “The economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms.” They’ve called California the “Venezuela of North America.”

#2 – Severe Existing Tax Treatment: The Tax Foundation in its 2012 State Business Tax Climate Index lists California at No. 48. CFO Magazine ranked California the worst state for tax treatment, as do many other rankings.

#3 – Future Tax Increases: Businesses will face higher income and sales taxes. The state has the largest budget deficit of any state. Employer costs will rise in 2013 as payroll taxes increase to bail out the Unemployment Insurance Fund (insolvent by $10 billion) and to cover excessive borrowing from the Disability Insurance Fund. Future bond borrowing costs will grow because California is S&P's lowest-rated U.S. state. (Bloomberg News, May 18, 2012: "Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking a 38,000 percent spending increase for a proposed high-speed rail system” despite a $15.7 billion deficit.)

#4 – Worst Regulatory Burden: California approved global warming cap-and-trade initiatives with 262 pages of new regulations and fees going into effect in early 2013 even though the state contributes less than 1 percent of the worlds’ green house gases. The draconian measures ignore Bain & Co.’s “regulatory hassle index” that found “California is far worse than any other state by a very significant margin.”

#5 – Unprecedented Energy Costs: California’s commercial electrical rates already average 50 percent  higher than in the rest of the country. The new 2013-2018 “green energy” mandates will boost rates by a minimum of another 19 percent in many California localities, which will harm companies in every industry.

#6 – Dreadful Legal Treatment: The Civil Justice Association of California said the state ranks 44th in legal fairness to business. In 2010, the Institute for Legal Reform found Los Angeles’ courts were the second worst in the nation for legal fairness, after Chicago’s, while San Francisco’s courts were the sixth worst.

#7 – Most Expensive Locations: The Milken Institute found that California businesses pay 23% more than the national average in operating costs. McAfee avoids hiring in California and saves about 30 percent to 40 percent every time it hires outside of the state. 

#8 – Oppressive Permitting Procedures: Obtaining permits from public agencies is extraordinarily expensive and time consuming because of confusing, extraneous and harsh requirements. Example: It can take 2 years to obtain permits just to build a restaurant in California while in other states it can be as little as 1-1/2 months.

#9 – Unfriendly Even to Small Businesses: In 2012, Thumbtack.com and the Kauffman Foundation gave California an “F” grade from small businesses for overall business unfriendliness, difficult regulations, tax code, licensing and health and safety. The finding echoes the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council in Virginia 2011 conclusion that California ranked 49th overall in terms of business friendliness.

#10 – ‘Composite’ Findings Put California Last: Development Counselors International in a 2011 survey of executives found that ranked California as having the worst business climate of any state based on operating costs, taxes and deficits. That reinforced the “Pollina Corporate Top 10 Pro-Business States for 2010” study that placed the state at the bottom based on labor costs, taxes, litigation abuse, crime rates, demographics, school dropout rates and other factors.

_NCTimes

As faux environmental political activists push California's utilities and more reliable power producers closer and closer to the brink, expect "power blackouts and brownouts" to move to the top of the list for reasons why businesses leave the golden state.

California is under the total control of morons, who elect imbeciles such as Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Jerry Brown, and Maxine Waters as their representatives. The clock is ticking down on their idiocy. Try not to be hurt too badly by the fallout that will accompany the state's downfall.

Political Left Crucifies Itself on a Great Green Cross

The left-leaning newspaper, the Washington Post, recently published an atypically honest editorial look at the green energy dysfunction -- a malady that afflicts a large proportion of modern leftist politicians -- including Barack Obama, Al Gore, Angela Merkel, Julia Gillard, Francois Hollande, and more . . .

Green energy is not cost-competitive with traditional energy and won’t be for years. So it can’t work without either taxpayer subsidies, much of which accrue to “entrepreneurs” such as Gore, or higher prices for fossil energy — the brunt of which is borne by people of modest means.

Consider California’s “net metering” subsidy for solar-panel users. As the New York Times reported in June, the program hugely benefits well-off consumers who can afford to install photovoltaic panels. They get sun power for their homes — plus an excess supply that utilities must buy. Thus utilities must also pay to keep them on the grid. Those costs get passed along to everyone else — including low-income customers.

For a sense of where this may lead, look at Germany, whose crash program to replace nuclear power with wind and solar is boosting electricity rates. Der Spiegel reports that 200,000 long-term unemployed lost power in 2011 because they couldn’t pay their electric bills.

Democrats try to square this circle by talking up “green jobs,” but expensive electricity is bad for industry, as Germany is discovering. Fact is, subsidies for green energy do not so much create jobs as shift them around.

...Government, with its inevitable susceptibility to lobbying and favoritism, should not be picking winners and losers, whether through green subsidies or tax breaks for oil and gas.

It’s one thing to lose your job because a competing firm built a superior mouse trap; it’s quite another, justice-wise, to lose it because a competitor talked the government into taking its side. _Washington Post

The editorialist Charles Lane was explicitly singling out Al Gore as a corrupt recipient of green government favours -- to the tune of about $100 million.

But the great green dysfunction is infested by corrupt hypocrites such as Gore. Barack Obama himself is unlikely to be satisfied with any less of a big money payday than Al Gore received, after leaving office.

And yet, there is a limit to the degree to which a moribund economy can be scammed, after a certain point. Obama may find himself to be one of the victims of his own great green dysfunctional policies. He may have to settle for only $50 million, for starters.